Pat LaFrieda Jr.’s Best Barbecue Practices: Starve Your Guests Until Meat Time
This might just be the most useful piece of advice we’ve ever heard (well, read) from Pat LaFrieda, Jr. While the majority of people don’t have high-end refrigerators to age our millions of dollars’ worth of steak, nor the means to butcher and barbecue an entire cow, we do have a very simple, fundamental ability: we can decide what not to serve at a party. (That, dear friends, is the definition of freedom. AMERICA!)
In a wonderfully cantankerous father-son interview with The Observer, LaFrieda and his dad talk about their life of beefbeefbeef, all day, every day — which, of course, can make barbecues potentially annoying. “In my house, we’re talking a minimum of 25 people, and frankly, there’s no bigger group of ball-busters than my family,” LaFrieda Jr. explains. Naturally, the rules of feeding a group of hungry Italian-Americans applies for all people:
“As for the food, I stopped making antipasto for these guys a long time ago because everyone gets to my house hungry, and if I start giving them tidbits and cheese plates and other things first, they never eat the things I’ve spent most of the day preparing, so I starve them out to make sure they eat what I want them to eat.”
Also, don’t be an idiot and close the top of the grill as soon as the meat hits it. “Putting cold meat onto a cold grill and closing the top, because then you’re just steaming the meat and it all turns grey,” Jr. warns. There’s all sorts of useful advice here, and if you’re a Real Man, you should take notes. Real Women should tune in, too. We’re not into that gender-normalizing business around these parts.
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